Fragile state

A fragile state is a low-income country characterized by weak state capacity and/or weak state legitimacy leaving citizens vulnerable to a range of shocks.

While many countries are making progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals, a group of 35 to 50 countries (depending on the measure used) are falling behind. It is estimated that out of the world's seven billion people, 26% live in fragile states, and this is where one third of all people surviving on less than US$1.25 per day live, half of the world's children die before the age of five, and one third of maternal deaths occur.

Not only are they falling behind, but the gap with other developing countries is widening since the 1970s. In 2006, per capita GDP grew only at 2% in fragile states, whereas it reached 6% in other low-income countries. Projections (for example, World Bank, 2008) that fragile states will constitute an even larger share of low-income countries in the future given that many better performing low-income countries graduate to middle-income status. This is a major challenge for development efforts and it has been argued by the Overseas Development Institute that fragile states require fundamentally different approaches from the development models exercised in more resilient countries, because of the different context of risk.

One common measure of state fragility is to use the World Bank's Country Policy and Institutional Assessment index, but more complex indexes, for example including the security dimension, are increasingly being used.

Country contexts vary widely in this group of countries ranging from Haiti to Nepal, from Uzbekistan to Burundi. Some are trapped in a vicious cycle of violent conflict and poverty or suffer from a natural resource "curse"; others face a legacy of poor governance; many emerging from crisis cannot deliver even the most basic services to their citizens, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. In terms of dynamics, fragile states include:

A fragile state is significantly susceptible to crisis in one or more of its sub-systems. It is a state that is particularly vulnerable to internal and external shocks and domestic and international conflicts. In a fragile state, institutional arrangements embody and perhaps preserve the conditions of crisis: in economic terms, this could be institutions (importantly, property rights) that reinforce stagnation or low growth rates, or embody extreme inequality (in wealth, in access to land, in access to the means to make a living); in social terms institutions may embody extreme inequality or lack of access altogether to health or education; in political terms, institutions may entrench exclusionary coalitions in power (in ethnic, religious, or perhaps regional terms), or extreme factionalism or significantly fragmented security organisations. In fragile states, statutory institutional arrangements are vulnerable to challenges by rival institutional systems be they derived from traditional authorities, devised by communities under conditions of stress that see little of the state (in terms of security, development or welfare), or be they derived from warlords, or other non-state power brokers.

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